Often times bringing one’s manager into a sales situation late in the funnel process produces positives results. A different perspective. A new set of eyes…and ears.

Back at it today after a four day break. Hopefully you had time to decompress, grab a bit of sleep and just relax. With just 22 days left in the selling season, the pressure is on, so it’s time to shake things up a bit.

It’s an interesting day since on one hand, you can accept the thought that the world is traveling or planning to travel later today; therefore, there’s no sense following up with your prospects in your December pipeline.

Try something different today. Tomorrow no one is going to be paying attention to you.

27 more selling days left in the year assumes that you (and more importantly, your prospects) are working this Wednesday, December 23rd and all 5 of the days between Christmas and New Year’s. The probability is pretty low that this is going to be the case, but days are days. The other issue that you need to consider in creating your own personal selling and closing calender between now and the rest of the year is that many of those days you define are not going to be fully available given the time of year with budget meetings and the end-of-the-year crunch.

So with just 27 more selling days left in the year, and you sitting there today frustrated that you still have not been able to break through to the key decision maker at your prospect, the purpose of this little blog series is to provide you with a tip a day. At this time of year, just leaving more voicemails and sending the same old emails is merely following of The Strategy of Hope.  Not a good strategy to follow at anytime and certainly not now.

With 28 more days in the year to actually close deals, if you’re having trouble getting to Mr/Ms Decision Maker, take a hard look at the messaging that you’ve been using. Think about all of those voicemails, emails, and marketing messages that you’ve been hitting the Decision Maker with, and ask yourself the simple, objective question of … “So What?”  If you were sitting in their seat, is the messaging that you’re hearing definitive in terms of the actual value that your product or service is going to provide them when they buy? Or is it just a list of cuter, quicker, smaller, cheaper features.

Today, there are 29 more days in the year in which we could close orders that are in our pipelines. Given typical sales cycles and the normal B2B complex selling processes, it’s almost impossible to believe that anything now that’s near the top of our funnels is going to move quickly downstream through the myriad of decision makers and signoffs so that it’s going to close before December 31st. So, right now, we’re talking about stuff in the narrow end of the funnel, typically in the stages that follow sending your proposals out: in some form of negotiation or in the seemingly black hole of “getting sign offs”.

Just back from an early morning walk on the beach. Love to get out there on the non-snow weekends just after the sun has come up, smell the ocean, figure out what’s changed on the beach from the tides the night before and walk the entire length of the beach picking up the plastic sea trash. Gives me something do, justifies the walk and keeps me green-friendly something I’m not in my day-to-day business life.

Yes, there is some snow at Stratton
Yes, Stratton is opening on Thanksgiving
Yes, it's very cold (8 on the beach today)
Yes, I will be snowboarding...again

1. 39-Still Plenty of Time